Taking Mumsnet HQ’s suggestion on board, this thread is for those who want scientific information about COVID-19. It is clearly advertised as scary, and has a trigger warning, so no complaints from anyone complaining they didn’t know what they were stumbling into.
I’ll only be sharing peer reviewed papers from respected journals and would advise anyone else who wants to share anything to use the same criteria.
The thread isn’t actually designed to scare. It’s designed to inform, so that people can make a decent assessment of risk and lobby decision makers when appropriate. Don’t assume government knows more than you. They’ve been behind the curve on everything.
I’ll start. The Guardian wrote a good article about the progress of respiratory viruses through autumn and how we don’t know whether SARS-COV-2 will compete with flu.
www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/19/what-happens-when-flu-meets-covid-19
The theory of viral competition suggests COVID19 might be kept at bay by flu. In other words infection by other respiratory viruses might help reduce the impact of a second wave.
However this peer reviewed study published in the Journal of Medical Virology suggests flu and COVID19 don’t compete, and coexist simultaneously.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jmv.26364
The inference is that having SARS-COV-2 circulating at the same time as influenza will cause more serious infection. It doesn’t seem that viral competition will make things better.
Practically what does this mean? I believe it means it is prudent to be even more cautious during flu season than we were in spring, and to do everything possible to reduce transmission. That is going to be particularly relevant to schools. Even if one refuses to accept schools play a role in COVID19 transmission, it is established science that schools are the engines behind influenza transmission every year, so precautionary measures make sense even if just to reduce spread of flu.